Comment Irix package manager (Score 2, Interesting) 386
I have to disagree with you here. I use inst & co. quite a lot (I admin a number of irix machines) and have very little good to say about it. It's may be a bit better than some others, but compared to apt/dpkg *or* rpm it's woefully inadequate. It's always a relief, after installing an irix box and weeding out the hundreds of unecessary fluf packages in the default install, to go back to one of my debian machines.
Version dependancies, for example, can be extremely confusing. If you have the wrong version of some eoe.* package for a package you want to install, it can be very difficult to parse the version info and jump through the necessary hoops to get what you want in place.
My biggest problem with inst, though, is that there is no effective way to deal with large numbers of packages. Sure, there are various keywords you can use, and they help, but they're basicaly a hack. Going through an extensive list (e.g., the freeware distribution, or even worse, the default install) and trying to prune out the stuff you don't want and/or put in the stuff you do want can be extremely unpleasant. I generaly find I have to make a large list, on paper, of the often literaly hundreds of package additions/removals, then use inst to implement them.
Version dependancies, for example, can be extremely confusing. If you have the wrong version of some eoe.* package for a package you want to install, it can be very difficult to parse the version info and jump through the necessary hoops to get what you want in place.
My biggest problem with inst, though, is that there is no effective way to deal with large numbers of packages. Sure, there are various keywords you can use, and they help, but they're basicaly a hack. Going through an extensive list (e.g., the freeware distribution, or even worse, the default install) and trying to prune out the stuff you don't want and/or put in the stuff you do want can be extremely unpleasant. I generaly find I have to make a large list, on paper, of the often literaly hundreds of package additions/removals, then use inst to implement them.
